The US–Philippine Relationship in American
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Destructive Creation The U.S.–Philippine Relationship in American Art J. M. Mancini Forged in war and framed by empire, the relationship between the United States and the Philippines has been as tumultuous as any of America’s en- counters with other Asian nations. And yet, as recent analysts have empha- sized, one of the most marked aspects of that long-running connection is the extent to which it has become hidden from the U.S. historical imagination through neglect, willful forgetting, and “miseducation.” The result has been the shrouding of the U.S.–Philippine relationship—and its violent founda- tion in the Philippine-American War—in what the poet and critic Luis H. Francia has called a “mantle of invisibility.” “Here is a war that lasted for a decade, cost so much more money and lives than the 1898 Spanish-American War,” Francia writes, “reduced in scale and intensity to a nonevent.”1 Francia’s critique also carries profound weight for the American art- historical imagination. To be fair, a small number of scholars have noted that the creation of works of art and architecture played a part in the U.S. imperial administration of the Philippines. Most recently, David Brody ex- plored how the colonization of the Philippines “permitted the acting out of American Orientalist fantasies” that had permeated U.S. visual and mate- rial culture in the late nineteenth century. And, as early as 1972 Thomas S. Hines noted that “[Daniel] Burnham’s mission to the Philippines as an architectural consultant in 1904 and 1905 and his subsequent plan- ning proposals for the cities of Manila and Baguio constituted indeed an architectural corollary to the earlier more salient programs of the United States for the islands’ political and economic development.” But in Ameri- can art scholarship at large there has been little exploration of the extent to which the turn-of-the-century Americans who forged empire shared the era’s 39 particularly intense attraction to art-making as a vehicle and venue for political, social, cultural, and economic transformation. This is surprising, for two reasons. The first is that architecture was only one of the wide range of aesthetic media in which Americans worked in this context, from photographs, picture postcards, and illustrated books, to buildings and landscapes. The second is that evidence for this ferment is not only to be found in the Philippines; a significant quantity of relevant material is also available in the United States, hidden in plain sight in repositories including the Smithsonian Institution.2 With this in mind, the first aim of this essay is to remove Hines’s qualification that “political and economic” programs pursued by the United States in the Philip- pines were “more salient” than merely “corollary” art and architectural measures. In fact, the U.S. political and economic programs that the historian Glenn May has insightfully called an “experiment in self-duplication” nearly always contained within them a constitutive element of aesthetic transformation that directly inter- sected with more familiar practices of “social engineering.” U.S. attempts to create and reformulate Philippine civic institutions along American lines entailed not only the reconfiguration of abstract principles and relations between people but also the physical and aesthetic reconstruction of “the political landscape” in the sense that the term is employed by the archaeologist Adam T. Smith—as a built environment comprising buildings, monuments, architectural decoration, and other works of visual art, which in turn became the physical context for the performance of aes- thetically charged civic rituals and the subject of further representation.3 The American reconstruction of the Philippine political landscape was, as this suggests, a complex and multifaceted process. On the most basic level, it involved the deployment—in the design and construction of U.S.-controlled institutions in the Philippines such as schools, hospitals, and prisons—of forms and styles that directly referenced the American metropole. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of large new neoclassical buildings such as the Manila building that was recently refurbished as the National Art Gallery. The structure was designed originally as the city’s public library by the American architect Ralph Harrington Doane and built, according to re- vised plans designed by the Filipino architect Juan Arellano, as the Legislative Building in 1926. Beyond “self-duplication,” however, the U.S. employment of neoclassicism also referenced the more general process of architectural reiteration that attended the imperial building projects of Britain and other European empires—including Spain, which in the Philippines employed neoclassicism in both civil and ecclesiastical build- ings such as the monumental Taal church in Batangas Province.4 In other instances, American structures referred to regional, vernacular, and domestic forms that were adapted to use in the Philippines. This is not to say 40 East–West Interchanges in American Art that such quotidian forms did not also have imperial associations. For instance, an American hospital built in the form of a bungalow referred both to U.S. domestic architecture (and perhaps especially to the domestic architecture of California, the home state of many Americans in the Philippines and the point of embarkation for the vast majority of U.S. soldiers and civilians alike) and to colonial Anglo-Indian architecture. What is striking in this case of an institution built in a vernacular, regional mode is that it was (like grander structures in more imposing styles) also understood by some American observers as a “monument” whose success as a work of institutional architecture correlated specifically to the success of American geo- political aims. This is made clear by a typed annotation affixed to a photograph of the building found in an album made by the American teachers Maud and Luther Parker. It describes the hospital as “entirely free from the usual odors of such insti- tutions” and the “main operating room” as “made of crystal,” and declares, “All of this is the great Monument of the American flag in the Philippine Islands.”5 Another quotidian form derived from an Asian original that Americans built into the Philippine landscape—and then represented in other media—was the ga- zebo. As is suggested by the thirteenth-century Southern Song dynasty painting collected by Charles Lang Freer, Strolling to a Lakeside Gazebo, gazebos historically were associated with elite social rituals. Wealthy Americans constructed them for private use in the nineteenth century, as may be seen in Thomas Hill’s painting Irrigating at Strawberry Farm (ca. 1865), depicting a California landowner with Chinese labor- ers before a gazebo and a distant Mission-revival mansion. But generally speaking it may be said that in the context of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States the gazebo acquired quite a different set of associations. Particularly when configured as a bandstand, the American gazebo came to be situated precisely at the confluence of landscape architecture and civic ritual and thus was perhaps quintessentially associated with the performance of Americanness. As such, gazebos were built not only on public greens but in institutions with an avowedly assimila- tionist purpose, such as Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian School.6 In the Philippines, Americans created, preserved, and reiterated gazebo land- scapes, both in symbolically important locations such as the large Manila park known as the Luneta and within new landscapes, including those specifically asso- ciated with American institutions. Both the Luneta and an open-air pavilion there preceded U.S. occupation. Nonetheless, from the beginning Americans worked to claim the site through use, alteration, and representation. During the Philippine- American War, the U.S. military used the park as an encampment ground for troops and for the procession of fallen officers, as well as the grounds for Fourth of July rituals and the performance of celebrations for other newly introduced holidays. Destructive Creation 41 1. Lambert-Springer Co., Park and Colonist Band, Iwahig Penal Colony, Island of Palawan, Philippines, ca. 1909–20. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. These and other uses were then photographed and sent back to the United States as commercial images. U.S. alterations included the extension of the park and creation of a “New Luneta,” on a large site reclaimed from the sea, on which a large flagpole was raised and two gazebos symmetrically placed on either side of the flagpole. This transformed landscape was the subject of American images intended for circulation to the United States and/or among Americans in the Philippines. One example, a postcard published by the Philippine Curio Agency, cast the gazebo-laden bayside stretch of the Luneta as a place where Americans could indulge in nostalgic yearn- ing. As the poem printed below the image lugubriously intoned, “The slow undu- lating blue waters/Bejeweled with sparkling white foam/Lazily waver in front of my vision,—Lazily whisper a message of home!”7 Americans also produced and reproduced gazebo landscapes mirroring the Unit- ed States in explicitly institutional contexts. One striking example of this is a post- card by the prolific Manila-based American publishers Leon J. Lambert and Milton Springer, depicting a white-clad band in and around a gazebo (Figure 1). Nearly every detail of this landscape—the waving American flag, the manicured grass, the immacu- late pathways, the slatted benches—evokes the United States. In some cases, these details evoke the landscape of California, notably the lush, yet controlled plantings of palms, the imposing mountains, and the pink-to-blue sky. Indeed, while there is no direct evidence that the landscape in the postcard was designed after a particular U.S. original, it is striking that the somewhat idiosyncratic palm-thatch roof of the gazebo, the Pacific vegetation, and the mountains do have counterparts in a specific 42 East–West Interchanges in American Art U.S.